Juno News - Majority of Canadians want a total pause in immigration

00:00:00.000 The majority of Canadians want to close our borders and pause our immigration into this

00:00:10.200 country. And this is according to a new scientific study, a poll commissioned by True North. So

00:00:16.680 three quarters of Canadians, 76%, who were polled by one, which is a research company based out of

00:00:22.800 Toronto, either strongly agree or moderately agree with the following statement. Canada should

00:00:28.600 temporarily pause immigration until a vaccine is developed for coronavirus and the unemployment

00:00:34.840 rate drops down to pre-corona levels. So this survey shows a vast consensus to the immigration

00:00:42.880 pause among basically all Canadians, all regions, age groups, education levels, income levels,

00:00:49.000 political party, and in both official languages. So yeah, that includes political party, even

00:00:54.700 liberal voters. So two thirds of Canadians who voted for the liberal party in the 2019

00:01:00.460 federal election supported this statement, 67%. And it was the same with the NDP, 66% supported

00:01:07.360 the statement. The consensus is even stronger among conservative voters, where 67% strongly

00:01:13.360 agreed with the statement, another 22% moderately agreed. So 89% of conservative voters would like

00:01:19.520 to have a total pause on immigration for the time being. Likewise, 48% of bloc supporters strongly

00:01:26.740 agreed with the statement, and another 39% moderately agreed. So overall majority of bloc voters as well

00:01:33.300 want this immigration pause. And Canadians said the same thing when it came to Canada's temporary

00:01:39.580 immigration programs. They also said that these should be suspended for the time being. Nearly two

00:01:45.080 thirds of all Canadians, 61% surveyed, said that they agreed with the idea that Canada should

00:01:50.300 temporarily pause the temporary foreign worker program until a vaccine is developed for coronavirus,

00:01:54.700 and until the unemployment rate drops down to pre-coronavirus levels. This is a pretty interesting

00:02:00.940 survey. I've been studying immigration numbers for a very long time, and I haven't seen a consensus

00:02:05.720 this strong. But I think the combination of the coronavirus and the threat that we know that comes

00:02:10.960 from international travel and international people coming to Canada, but also the horrible effect

00:02:16.520 that it has had on our economy. You know, the driving idea behind large immigration is that it's supposed

00:02:22.500 to boost the economy and fill labor market shortages. Well, right now there's so many Canadians out of work

00:02:27.200 that it doesn't really make sense to have a lot of immigrants coming in. And so if you look at the

00:02:33.040 unemployment rate pre-coronavirus, before the lockdowns, it was at 5.6%. Right now in May 2020,

00:02:40.620 which was the most recent job report, Canada's unemployment rate is at an all-time high of 13.7%.

00:02:47.180 So it really begs the question of why we still have temporary foreign workers coming into Canada

00:02:53.160 when we have millions of Canadians who don't have jobs, who are looking for jobs. Why are we bringing in 0.74

00:02:58.900 low-skilled labor from developing countries and also therefore increasing our risk? Now, 1.00

00:03:05.080 I want to address one other point because a lot of Canadians wrongly believe that our borders are

00:03:10.000 currently closed right now. Well, Justin Trudeau did announce a border closure. He announced that

00:03:14.520 airports were closed, but that is mostly for tourists. It's mostly just tourists that aren't

00:03:18.960 allowed in because there were so many exemptions and exceptions to these rules when it came to anyone

00:03:23.940 in the supply chain, anyone who was working that needed to come into Canada, and also

00:03:28.600 exemptions for international students, for temporary foreign workers, and for other parts of our

00:03:33.680 immigration system. So all you have to do is look at the recent report from the CBSA, the Canadian

00:03:39.140 Border Service Agency, security agency, I should say, and it paints a totally different picture. So

00:03:44.500 between March 21st, when the border was closed, when Trudeau announced, made the announcement,

00:03:49.860 and June 3rd, which is the most recent report, one million people have entered Canada land border

00:03:55.600 crossings, and another 763,000 travelers arrived at the international airports. So we don't know the

00:04:02.880 nationality of the people who are coming over the land border, but we do know air travelers. So of

00:04:08.180 those 763,000 people who have landed at Canadian international airports, only 283,000 were Canadian

00:04:15.920 citizens, 21,000 were permanent residents, which means that more than half, 459,000 people,

00:04:23.020 to have come to Canada in the past three months have been new immigrants. And again, that's because 1.00

00:04:29.020 Trudeau's supposed travel ban includes wide exemptions for new immigrants, international

00:04:34.260 students, agriculture workers, and people coming through the temporary foreign worker program. A

00:04:41.040 recent report revealed that 13,000 temporary foreign workers have come to Canada between March 15th

00:04:46.440 and May 8th. Doesn't really sound like our borders are closed. Well, according to one research,

00:04:51.480 most Canadians would prefer that our immigration stopped, that we have no immigration for the time 0.87

00:04:57.120 being. And I think politicians would be wise to listen to Canadians on this. For True North, I'm Candice Malcolm.

Juno News - June 11, 2020

Majority of Canadians want a total pause in immigration

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